Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a